Almost every one of Delany’s novels could have been named Stranger in a Strange Book. But here the strangeness works. Even today many doubt that genre conventions can coexist with literary experimentation. Babel-17 is a corrective to that skepticism, an avant-garde space opera that sets its own terms of engagement and played a key role in reinventing science fiction during a period of transition and transgression....

Many readers are daunted by the length and experimentation of Delany's Dhalgren. And why read a 800-page novel, when you can savor the best passages in 140-character tweets? With that in mind, I have distilled Mr. Delany's Dhalgren into some bite-size extracts suitable for Twitter....To read more, click here

"If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double", Charles McGrath once quipped, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'"